Best email setup for a new business
Sending business emails from a personal Gmail or Hotmail address undersells you more than most founders realise, and fixing it is genuinely cheap and quick.
Why this matters more than it seems
An email address at your own domain, you@yourbusiness.co.uk rather than yourbusiness@gmail.com, signals a level of seriousness that costs almost nothing to achieve but noticeably changes how clients perceive you, particularly for anything B2B.
Getting a domain first
You’ll need your own domain name before a custom email address makes sense, a registrar like Cloudflare Registrar sells these at cost with no markup, and it’s a five minute setup.
Setting up the actual email
Google Workspace and Zoho Mail are the two names that come up most for small business email. Zoho has a genuinely free tier for a small number of users which covers most solo founders, Google Workspace costs more but integrates deeply if you’re already using Google’s other tools daily.
Don’t overcomplicate this
You don’t need an elaborate email marketing platform on day one, that’s a separate tool for a separate job. You just need a professional address that matches your business name and forwards reliably to wherever you actually check messages.